Three years ago for Mother’s Day, I asked my husband to take a road trip with our daughters. I’d been out of town with the girls myself a few weeks prior, visiting my parents during what was our older child’s elementary school spring break. What I needed more than brunch or earrings or whatever lukewarm token of appreciation women with children are routinely offered on the second Sunday in May was time to myself.

This desire is well-worn for parents, and possibly especially the female ones, who study after study confirm remain responsible for two-thirds of all parenting labor when they also work outside the home. I was no exception to the rule, though my husband George was always happy to pitch in. As he was leaving for the gym that morning of the trip, George stopped, choosing his words with the care of the married, and said to me: “I’m going to pack for the kids, but if you can think of anything that I might forget, could you lay it on the bed?”

I asked him, “What is it that you think you are likely to forget?”

He thought. “Their bathing suits,” he said.

“Well see, now you’ve remembered,” I said, sounding to my ear like the equanimous badger mother in the Frances children’s books. I love her. He nodded and headed out the door.

A part of me felt good about the exchange. I stood up for myself, I’d been good-humored about it, and George would remember the bathing suits (which the girls would gleefully sleep in when he ultimately forgot their pajamas). But the devil on my shoulder—the one internalized over decades of white noise about women and their responsibilities and their relative place—egged me on: you’re not being fair to him. He’s taking them away, after all. Just throw some stuff together. It’s only a one-night trip. It’ll take you 30 seconds. I gathered the iPad and some toys and put them in a bag.

Decades of data collection by Pew Research and the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the U.S. reveals that dads’ contributions to childcare rose as mothers entered the workforce in greater numbers over the second half of the twentieth century, but leveled off by the late 1990s without ever reaching any sort of halfway mark. In houses with two employed parents today, the division of childcare work between mothers and fathers holds steady where it stalled around the turn of the millennium, at 65 and 35 percent respectively. This beats the 80/20 breakdown of the 1970s and 80s, but runs contrary to popular notions of gender progress in the home. Even among couples who say they value equality, researchers find that women do much more. Gender attitudes do not predict behavior.

George’s packing skills had gone untested for too long. What he and I had failed to anticipate before we had kids was that just as time would soon begin rushing all too quickly forward, the introduction of children into our home would also spirit us backwards in a way, to retrogressive behaviors that flew in the face of our progressive ideals.

In the field of sociology, family research explores this dynamic. The last decade’s family studies journals are peppered with sentences like these: ”increasing levels of maternal employment…have not resulted in more equitable gender distribution of housework and childcare time,” and ”gender specialization is least pronounced when both spouses are employed full time, but even in these households, women generally do most of the housework and childcare,” and “we are just beginning to understand why [fathers] do so little.”

Sociology has also given us the following data: that mothers are significantly more likely than fathers to stay home from work with a sick child; that fathers who work long hours have wives who do more child care, while mothers who work long hours have husbands who sleep more and watch lots of television; that working mothers with preschool-aged children are two and a half times likelier than fathers to get up in the middle of the night to tend to their kids; that men with babies spend twice as much weekend time engaged in leisure activity as their female partners. Each metric reveals something new and also the same old same old, like so many articles declaring that x behavior advances a man’s career, but is likely to hurt a woman’s. There are infinite ways to reveal which gender has more leeway and more room.

The division of unpaid labor has been called the most important gender equity issue of our time, yet at the current rate of change the United Nations International Labour Organization estimates it will be another 200 years before women living with men achieve parity in their homes. The relationship cost is high. Research across western nations finds that couples in which male partners slack off are more likely to separate than couples in which men do more. Women who say childcare falls mainly to them are 45 percent less likely to report that their marriages are “very happy.” Mothers also take hits to their health and their wages—blows not borne by fathers.

What many women would like this Mother’s Day is some recalibration. This requires a thoughtful reckoning, as fathers are less likely than mothers to report that tasks at home are unequally shared, or to feel bothered by the imbalance when they do notice it. We live in a culture that values women’s needs and desires less than men’s. It’s not easy to admit that unacknowledged sexism impacts our most intimate relationships—though really how would it not? It’s an acknowledgment that mothers sorely need, a first step on a long road to achieving something longer lasting than flowers or candy: a sense of being valued and honored by our children’s fathers, not just one day a year, but every.

AMG/Parade Digital

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